Voice-activated technology and smart speakers – Amazon Echo and Google Home – are dramatically affecting the daily lives of Americans and how they interact with brands. Curious how this new tech will affect your marketing? Start by getting to know the audience.

New research from NPR and Edison Research offers the first in-depth look at the behaviors and attitudes of Americans who already have smart speaker devices in their homes. Find out why 42% of users say their device is now “essential” to their everyday life — and why 65% wouldn’t go back to life without one.

GET THE SMART AUDIO REPORT: PART ONE AND PART TWOTOP REASONS MARKETERS ARE PAYING ATTENTION TO SMART SPEAKERS

'The Jim Jefferies Show' will be the inaugural podcast, with more coming from Trevor Noah and other network personalities.

Comedy Central is expanding into the podcasting world.

The network will launch a global podcast network featuring brand extensions of its existing franchises as well as new original content. The Jim Jefferies Show will be the inaugural offering, debuting Wednesday. It will be available for download and streaming worldwide across Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher and other digital platforms.

Additional franchises that will roll out including The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, the Comedy Central Roast franchise and Comedy Central Stand-Up, along with other soon-to-be-announced series. Comedy Central has partnered with podcast industry leader Midroll Media, home of the top comedy podcasts on the Earwolf network, to advise on the creation of its new podcast network and also to represent its shows for advertising sales.

The move into podcasting signals Comedy Central’s increasing push into digital, where it boasts over 168 million fans for its collective franchises across digital and social platforms.

“Podcasting is the next step in the evolution of Comedy Central content, an extremely versatile and exciting medium that furthers our 360 strategy to allow our talent to express their vision and connect directly with fans across multiple platforms,” Steve Raizes, senior vp, Comedy Central Consumer Products, Experiential and Audio, said in a statement. “We’re huge fans of podcasting and truly excited to create content based on our signature properties as well as entirely new concepts.”

Speech to TextCheaper, better transcription built with our own content for the BBC's problems

Speech-to-text has recently moved from the lab to the newsroom as a production-ready technology for journalists inside the BBC and we will be showcasing some of the many uses that speech-to-text can be put to in the broadcasting environment. These include helping journalists rapidly find footage in large archives, helping them quickly subtitle ‘water cooler’ content so it can be shared more widely on social media and helping them quickly transcribe interviews.

We will also be able to explain how broadcasters with large subtitle archives can achieve similar results and the work the BBC has done to help steer academic research in this area towards the sort of real-world problems that broadcasters face.

Object-Based AudioORPHEUS Collaborative ProjectORPHEUS is a European collaborative project that aims to create an end-to-end object-based audio broadcast system. Using the BBC’s IP Studio platform, we are developing the tools, formats and protocols required to produce and deliver object-based content. This work will inform the design of future broadcast systems and our work on emerging standards.

On show at IBC will be The Mermaid’s Tears, our interactive audio drama where you can follow any one of three characters through the story and which we produced using our system. It was broadcast live, making it the first live interactive object-based broadcast. To produce this experience we developed a novel audio control interface to generate the ADM metadata that describes the mix for each character. Visit our stand to experience the drama and learn more about how we created it.

UK ultrafast broadband, TV and mobile provider, Virgin Media, has joined forces with Radioline to offer an innovative radio experience on its TV platform. The Radioline TV app is now available to Virgin TV customers in the UK with a V6 box.

At the same time, the company has been looking to hire multiple team members to build out its voice control capabilities, including a job offer for a “Sr. Interaction Designer, Voice,” as well as a “Voice User Interface Designer” who is supposed to become Roku’s “expert on all things voice related.”But, that’s not all. Current LinkedIn profiles for Roku employees Tyler Bell (i.e. natural language understanding and automated speech recognition) and Hari Ramakrishnan (i.e. far-field voice and audio engineering) both list voice technologies as among their current responsibilities. So, is this a sign that Roku is about to launch a smart speaker?

There have been rumors for weeks about Google nearing the release of a smaller version of the Google Home. DroidLife just posted what it claims is the upcoming Google Home Mini.

If true, the design speaks the same language of the Google Home. The little puck uses the same cloth covering found on larger version. Gone are the multi-colored lights, replaced by four soft-white lights on top of the device. And just like the Google Home, Google Assistant is built-in, ready to do its owner’s bidding.

Audio company Bose, maker of market-leading noise canceling headphones, has upgraded its flagship headset with optimization of Google Assistant, the intelligence built into Google Home smart speakers. Google Home is currently the chief competitor to Amazon Alexa in the still-new voice-activated speaker niche. This integration, which connects the headphone-wearing user with an Android device via voice activation, is significant because it implies that — as with smartphones — the ecosystem is the product.

Improvements in machine learning have allowed us to train our own speech-to-text system. It’s found a myriad of uses from archive search to improving social media shareability.

Speech-to-text is a process for automatically converting spoken audio to text. It has recently moved from the lab to the newsroom as a useful new tool for broadcasters and journalists. Breakthroughs in automatic analysis and improvements in affordability mean that running it at scale over hundreds of thousands of hours of content is now feasible. Increases in accuracy mean that users will have a realistic chance of finding what they want in minutes rather than hours, especially in genres such as news or factual content.

Why it matters

The BBC has one of the largest archives of broadcast material in the world, but only a fraction of it is truly searchable. We know there are hidden gems throughout the hundreds of thousands of hours of TV and Radio we’ve digitised, but there’s currently no easy way to find them. Speech-to-text is the first step in this process, as it allows a semi-accurate transcript of what’s said to be made searchable.

That’s the argument of the BBC’s Trushar Barot, who believes voice AI is the biggest technology revolution that the news industry is missing — and that it’s not too late to do something about it.By TRUSHAR BAROT Sept. 18, 2017, 10 a.m. This year, the iPhone turned 10. Its launch heralded a new era in audience behavior that fundamentally changed how news organizations would think about how their work is discovered, distributed and consumed.

This summer, as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I’ve been looking at another technology I think could lead to a similar step change in how publishers relate to their audiences: AI-driven voice interfaces, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home and Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s upcoming HomePod. The more I’ve spoken to the editorial and technical leads building on these platforms in different news organizations, as well as the tech companies developing them, the more I’ve come to this view: This is potentially bigger than the impact of the iPhone. In fact, I’d describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they’ll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn’t even know it’s standing on.

This wasn’t how I planned to open this piece even a week before my Nieman fellowship ended. But as I tied together the research I’d done with the conversations I’d had with people across the industry, something became clear: As an industry, we’re far behind the thinking of the technology companies investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Over the past year, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other global tech giants have all said, in different ways, that they now run “AI-first” companies. I can’t remember a single senior news exec ever mentioning AI and machine learning at any industry keynote address over the same period.

Of course, that’s not necessarily surprising. “We’re not technology companies” is a refrain I’ve heard a lot. And there are plenty of other important issues to occupy industry minds: the rise of fake news, continued uncertainty in digital advertising, new tech such as VR and AR, and the ongoing conundrum of responding to the latest strategic moves of Facebook.

But as a result of all these issues, AI is largely being missed as an industry priority; to switch analogies, it feels like we’re the frog being slowly boiled alive, not perceiving the danger to itself until it’s too late to jump out.

“In all the speeches and presentations I’ve made, I’ve been shouting about voice AI until I’m blue in the face. I don’t know to what extent any of the leaders in the news industry are listening,” futurist and author Amy Webb told me.

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